


monsters are always hungry

by faeded



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Exy (All For The Game), Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 19:52:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16625414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faeded/pseuds/faeded
Summary: “No vampires,” Catherine (Eliza, Lauren, Alice, all of her names appear as a blur in his mind until all he can think is Mary) says, her voice final, and his eyes snap towards her face once more. Maybe she had known, he thinks now that he’s looking at her properly, still shoving the panic far enough. “Abram. Tell me the rules.”“Mum,” he says once more, and he can hear his accent shifting towards the more British one that he associated with her and only her.“Don’t look back, don’t slow down, and don’t trust anyone. Be anyone but yourself and never be anyone for too long. And stay away from vampires. Repeat them to me, Abram.” Her eyes were hard as she talked, as she grabbed his arm when he went a few seconds too long without responding, her hold firm enough that he focused completely on what she was saying despite the situation.





	monsters are always hungry

**Author's Note:**

> this... really wasn't something i was planning on writing because, one i thought i was over tvd when i was like sixteen and had every intention to be over with it too, and second i had Stuff started i should have focused on. instead my brain only wanted to do this, so here we are. so, yeah, this is based on tvd (season one to two, mainly, i have a bit outlined but not all, so many three too. actually, i have nowhere enough outlined of this now that i've thought about it)
> 
> the title is from richard siken's snow and dirty rain (one day i will get better at thinking titles, but today is not the day). i probably will update the tags later, but i put the 'graphic violence' just in case. there's also mary, and how she treated neil during the time in the run, but if i think of any other things that should be tagged (or if anyone sees anything and wants me to add it), i will.

Jake doesn’t cry when he stops the car in some deserted road in California when his mother says so, the kind that few people use and the sunset already appearing, late enough that he thinks it’s probable that he he and his mother have enough time to not be bothered. He is, however, pushing down the panic as he looks at her, how her breathing has changed, how obvious it is now that she is hurt in more ways than he had thought.

(He remembers the fight, her mother holding off the group of vampires that had been attacking them. How he had stacked one of them before managing to run away, screaming, “Mom!” when she noticed how Nathan and her were fighting. He had his fangs on her neck, but she had stabbed him in the stomach for that, probably missing his heart due to the pain. Her mother had always been good in a fight, but even she has her limits against more than three vampires, or against one that is said to be centuries old.

Most would say it is already a miracle she lived as long as she did, but then Jake does not believe in miracles. His mother had lived as long as she had because of her will and strength. There had been no miracles in their lives.)

“Mum…” It is obvious that her wounds are more serious than either of them had thought, that something had broken inside of her while fighting Nathan and the puncture wounds from her neck weren’t the only place where she was bleeding. But if she is bleeding, it is internal, and Jake doesn’t know what to do with that. Well, he  _ has  _ one idea, but she won’t like it, and he is aware of that even as he speaks once more. “Mum, we need to find vampire’s blood, that can—”

“No vampires,” Catherine (Eliza, Lauren, Alice, all of her names appear as a blur in his mind until all he can think is _Mary_ ) says, her voice final, and his eyes snap towards her face once more. Maybe she had known, he thinks now that he’s looking at her properly, still shoving the panic far enough. Her gaze shifts, though, so he has a feeling that he isn’t doing the best of jobs at keeping his expression determined as she wants him to. To be fair, he was sitting in a car with his mother dying in the passenger seat, so he feels as though that should earn him some sort of reprieve. As it stands, though, he knows his mother would see that as weakness, and there was no place for weakness in their lives. “Abram. Tell me the rules.”

“Mum,” he says once more, and he can hear his accent shifting towards the more British one that he associated with her and only her, and that he sometimes still defaulted to when it was just the two of them, even with Catherine repeating that he could not afford slipping because if it happened while they were alone, it meant it could also happen when they were outside, and that would be a mistake they could not afford.

“Don’t look back, don’t slow down, and don’t trust anyone. Be anyone but yourself and never be anyone for too long. And stay away from vampires.  _ Repeat them to me, Abram _ .” Her eyes were hard as she talked, as she grabbed his arm when he went a few seconds too long without responding, her hold firm enough that he focused completely on what she was saying despite the situation.

He repeats them back to her, if only because he recognises some of the desperation that had appeared in her eyes by the end of it, and it is obvious she did not have long, so he says the litany back to her, as familiar now as the back of his own hand after years and years of repeating the phrases.

He knows, after all, that not running meant getting caught, and that meant death. Being found meant being killed, which is why he and Catherine ( _ Mary _ ) had spent all those years never settling down anywhere, changing name after name in an attempt to lose their pursuers, and Catherine had spent hours repeating to him how he had to be no one and nothing in order to change identities perfectly, to blend in and not make people question anything about him (Part of him wonders if some part of her had hoped that if he tried hard enough, he would become nothing and then they would stop running because he would have no worth anymore).

And, most importantly, he knows that staying away from vampires is crucial in not getting caught as well, considering Nathan is extremely well connected, but he had had to offer it as a solution, at least. Even when he realised that there was no way they would find some fast enough to heal her, he had felt like he was choking, so he had been unable to remain silent.

Maybe if they had tried before, but she had stayed quiet, so there was nothing that could be done now because there was simply no more  _ time _ .

And so, because he does know all of this, and also because he does want his mom to die with something that could at least resemble peace, he says back the words and promises never to stop running, and she exhales, as if relieved. After what seems like no time at all, she finally stops breathing, and Jake has to move, his mother voice already telling him he can’t waste time, that he needs to dispose of all the evidence as best he can and then move on so he won’t be caught.

Jake doesn’t cry when she stops breathing, and he doesn’t either when he burns her body until there’s nothing left of her but ashes, or when he buries her in a (shallower that he would have preferred to give his mother, but deep enough) grave in the sand, nor when he walks away from the beach and leaves behind the sound of the ocean. 

He does fall to his knees, however, twelve hours afterwards when he’s once more in the highway, looking for a car that can pick him up and drop him in San Francisco, where he knows one of his mother’s contacts is, and it takes everything in him to be able to pick himself up once more and not break there and then.

*

He leaves Jake behind as soon as he reaches San Francisco, although he doesn’t decide on a new name either. He needs to find one of his mother’s contact in the city to get a new I.D. at the very least. There’s more that he needs, but he mainly wants a new name and to have the documentation at hand in case any authority asks any questions.

He stops before that in a gas station, however, where one of the people who had picked him up had left him. He hasn’t eaten in almost twenty hours now, and he hasn’t slept either. It’s not like he isn’t used to going much longer periods of time without eating, or that he hasn’t gone days before where he couldn’t stop and rest and had forced himself to go on. But that had been before, back when he had his mother watching his back. Now he’s on his own, so he can’t risk fainting from lack of food or being too tired to notice things.

Besides, he can use the bathroom there, and he wants to do that too.

Afterwards, he buys a coffee, that gives him a much needed caffeine rush after a short while, and a couple granola bar he eats while looking at a map of the country that he bought in order to decide where to go next. It’s not ideal, but it’s detailed enough that he can get a general idea of where he wants to go after he leaves San Francisco. 

Arizona will do, he decides, after eyeing the map while he finishes his coffee. Not Phoenix, though, he thinks he wants to go to a small town after spending the last years in big cities. They have their advantages, such as being perfect for losing oneself in the millions of people that were there, but small towns could also be useful, and it was best not to form a pattern. If he can find a dying town, he can find somewhere to squat for the time being which would save him money, and small towns usually mean gossip. It means he’ll have to have his story perfected by then, that people will talk about him because he’ll stand out immediately, no matter how much he tries to blend in, but that will be at first. If he makes himself dull enough (not antisocial enough, not social enough, not into any clubs, average grades— He knows by now how to become the most average and unmemorable person, he’s been doing it ever since he was ten when his mother took him from home and they ran away), people will get bored of him.

 

And once the disadvantages are out of the way, he can use the gossip that small towns bring. As soon as anything above typical happens, at least half the town would talk about it if he found one which fitted his needs. 

*

Half the town does  _ not  _ start to talk about it when strangers appear, and Millport fails him.

It is unfortunate in the sense that he had  _ truly  _ not wanted to leave the town just yet. He had joined the track team, and he had liked the people there. Most of them were friendly without asking anything out of him once they realised he had no interest in anything but running and being left alone. He was still deep in grief over his mother’s death while staying there, which meant he wasn’t in the mood to make any friends. It was enough that he was part of the track team— She had never enjoyed him joining it, considering he had joined more than a few during the different towns and cities they had visited.

He had also joined some other teams, when he was younger (He had been pretty good at lacrosse, but he had never loved it enough to fight his mother on it as much as he had loved simply running), but after a few years, whenever he joined any team, it had been track. As long as he never joined any competitions, his mother had been fine with it. Well, for the most part. He can still remember how the slaps felt when he was thirteen and came home to tell her, basically bouncing on his feet and with the biggest smile in his face, about how his coach thought he could be one of the best racers he had yet seen and how he could win competitions.

That had ended with him gaining a few more bruises, no smile in his face, and them moving two days later, as soon as his mother had been able to finish all of her business in the city to be able to disappear without a trace.

But for the most part, his mother had allowed him to race as long as he did not bring too much attention to himself or they left before that, considering him being fast could be useful after all, with the type of life they led. He would never be fast enough to outrun a vampire, they both knew that, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to be as fast as possible in order to be able to survive as long as possible, and sometimes his survival depended as much in him being able to wield weapons and fight well as it did in him leaving a place as fast as possible after attacking a vampire and gaining a few seconds of advantage.

So, yes, he had not wanted to leave Millport, with the track team that was small and unimportant enough that it would never get noticed by anyone, with the people who were nice enough but mainly left him alone.

But his latest encounter with some of Nathan’s people means he’ll have to.

It had gone like this: He had arrived at school an hour before anyone else, because it had been one of the days he had decided to go to the house he had been squatting in rather than risk staying too much in school and get discovered (He thinks he should be grateful he had decided to do that, really, because he’s not sure how it would have ended had he been there asleep. He is a light sleeper, but he’s constantly afraid it won’t be enough when the time comes, and he’ll be caught unguarded). He had gone to shower, and after he had finished drying himself and put on his clothes, had checked the time before deciding it was soon enough that he could enter the school. It would still be mostly deserted for at least another fifteen minutes, but it wouldn’t be seen as strange if there was already a student there that had arrived early.

However, as soon as he had stepped in the main building, every instinct in him had flared up, a voice that sounded exactly like his mother whispering  _ DANGER  _ in his mind, and he had gone to take out a stake and a knife a second later because Liam could be many things, but he wasn’t an idiot who walked around weaponless when he knew what hid in the dark.

He doesn’t remember that much from the fights themselves, but he remembers the important parts: Finding one of the two janitors with their throat ripped out, which explained the complete silence since the other one wouldn’t be at the school for another hour, and him grimacing at how obvious the vampire had been, not bothering to hide the body at all and simply leaving it in the middle of the corridor, how obvious it had been that he wanted for the man to suffer as much as possible while he was feeding off him. He remembers catching one of the vampires unaware and not facing the door as he fed from a teacher that always arrived early and that was already passed out from the blood loss. He remembers stacking it, and then taking the stake out as soon as he realised it was dead, and leaving the room to walk around and see if there were any other vampires out there that wished to kill him that he should be aware of.

Because apparently the universe has decided that its newest hobby (New for the universe, that has existed for however many millions years, he guesses, since getting hunted down and near-death-experience got old for him six months after running away) is to fuck with his life: Yes, there had been another vampire waiting for him.

That’s where things get blurry for him, and by the end of it, he ends with a neck bleeding from a shallow wound that even now he knows won’t leave a scar, and a few that ones that will definitely leave at least one scar from the vampire who had had a knife of his own and had decided he wanted to stab him with it. Whatever. At least he got to see his face when he felt his blood and felt the vervain lacing it, and when he had used the second long distraction to stake him in the heart and kill him.

In the end, however, it comes down to the fact that he has blood on him, there’s the body of two people in the school (one which is certainly dead, and the other one might be as well), the ones of two vampires lying gray and unmoving as well, and he does not want to deal with the aftermath.

Liam looks at the mess that surrounds him, sights, mutters, “Dammit”, and leaves the school to get changed into clothes which are not splattered with blood and to decide what he wants to do next. He’ll have to change his name for sure, though, maybe dye his hair a lighter brown as well.

*

He leaves Liam behind and becomes Julian, takes to looking at a map once more to choose where to go and decides maybe he will stick with a city big enough to lose himself in this time after all.

Changing identities comes easy by now, mainly because most of the time, while he’s pretending to be other people he invented, they are not terribly different one from another. He adds small details to them (Chris enjoyed music, Adam had had a fascination with cars when he was little, Jordan had enjoyed going to the playground and spending hours in the slides, etcetera, etcetera), mostly out of boredom but also to try and make them slightly more believable and closer to real people, because for the most part, all of the boys he has pretended to be are unremarkable enough that he has stopped feeling real a long time ago. He always changes his backstory (One time the story was that his mother and him had moved because of a divorce, another that his father had died when he was four, other than his father had left them a month ago and so his mother needed a new start, another that he had never met his father, etcetera, etcetera), but little else.

He tries to shove his temper as deep inside him as possible in order not to fight anyone, and as long as he does not become close to people, he can manage that well enough. Having a temper is probably one of the most unfortunate things in this whole thing, Julian thinks, because people with tempers are easily remembered and he does not need that.

*

After Arizona, he considers crossing the border and moving to Mexico for a few years, or maybe returning to Europe, considering the years spent there had been the ones where Nathan had seemed to track them the least often. But crossing the Atlantic is out of the question for a few years, Julian knows that. He may be almost sixteen, and his I.D says he’s an year older than he truly is, but in the end that doesn’t mean much, at least for another year, and to make matters worse, he looks younger than he truly is.

It could go well, have the papers which say he is allowed to travel by himself, but it could also end horribly, so he prefers to stick to cars and high hiking for the time being, at least until he stops looking like he’s fifteen. It would help if he grew a few inches more, but he has mostly given up on that. He had stopped growing a few years ago, and maybe it had been due to his mother’s genes, whose family tended to be short in general, or maybe it had been how badly he had eaten ever since they had left Baltimore, but the fact remained that it seemed to be no growth spur in the horizon.

In the end he decides he’ll stick to staying in the United States a while longer, considering he and his mother had barely gotten there before the whole mess that had been Seattle and Mary had been— Hmm. No, not thinking about that, Julian decides, not when he’s constantly tired and wants nothing but to give up and rest when that’s not even remotely an option. Nothing good will come out of him dwelling too long about his mother’s death, not when the only thing that is still keeping him on his feet is his promise to her and how her voice is still in his brain, telling him to ‘ _ move, move, what are you doing wasting time, Abram, don’t you know better by now, keep going— _ ’, repeating most of the things she had told him during the years they had spent together.

*

He trades Arizona for Utah, and then crosses states once more for Colorado where he decides to settle in Denver for a while. It’s big enough for it to fit into his idea of a big city where he can get lost in the sea of people.

It’s not as big as some of the other cities he has stayed in, but it works for now. He wonders about getting into school again before he dismisses the idea as a waste of too much effort and time, and instead walks around until he finds a place that will hire him.

It doesn’t pay particularly well, but he finds another part time job, lying through his teeth about saving for college and helping at home with bills, and it’s enough for it to cover rent and groceries, considering that the money his mother had taken from her husband before leaving had been rapidly dwindling down and he feels uneasy at the thought of how much (how little) he has left. It should last him for a while still, especially considering now he’s on his own, and before the money had had to be enough for both him and his mother, but fake I.D.s and the like is expensive. Because of that, his mother had usually also worked in most of the places they had gone, in order to touch the money as little as possible.

Considering he’s not squatting this time, Julian prefers to work as well and use it as little as possible. He’ll have to spend some money in some cheap clothes as well, and that makes him grimace enough as it is.

*

Denver doesn’t last for too long either, however, and he has to deal with another vampire finding him in his second job as he’s closing the café for the night.

They are finding him more often nowadays, and Julian isn’t sure whether it’s his fault and he’s simply not good enough at hiding, or if something else has been going on that has made the hunt for him grow more fervent. If he didn’t know better, he’d say Nathan is getting desperate to get his hands on him.

As it is, he met the man only once, and it was enough for him to be quite sure Nathan doesn’t do desperate, but it still leaves him feeling unsettled. Because if Nathan ever becomes desperate, he doubts it will be good for everyone else around him.

He’s been running for years now, and it’s becoming more difficult rather than easier lately, which isn’t ideal when he’s on his own with no one to watch his back and at this point he’s feeling exhausted all of the time. He has stopped himself from thinking too much about Mary as well, pushing away any emotions and relying on suppressing them rather than face them because he’s not sure what will happen if he does otherwise. 

The whole situation is enough to make him stop and consider his options, and try to look at himself and see just how close he is to truly giving up.

In the end, he digs a paper from his duffer bag and presses the numbers in his phone, waiting for a few seconds before someone picks it, and saying, “Uncle Stuart.”


End file.
